This application is directed to a symmetrically shaped product cup having a flat bottom converging into a continuous side wall which in turn converges into a planar lip. One or more fluted features are formed in either the side wall or the lip for structural integrity and ease of dispensing of product from the packaging cup.
Packaging cups are known which are utilized for holding either liquid, semi solid or solid products. These include packaging cups for condiments and food stuffs such as catsup, mustard, pudding and syrup, packaging cups for beverage additives such as liquid or powdered cream and packaging cups for individual servings of spreads such as honey, jellies, butter and margarine.
These cups are normally formed utilizing a thermo form process, filled with product and sealed with a foil or film cover. The cups can be formed, filled and sealed on a single machine or preferably formed independently from the filling and sealing operation. By forming the cups independent of the fill and seal operations the complexity of the machinery needed is lessened resulting in economy of operation.
As independently formed in a thermo forming process, a matrix of cups is formed from a single sheet of resilient material. The matrix of the cups can then be loaded onto a fill and seal cup packager where the cups are filled and then hermetically sealed with an appropriate peelable foil or film covering. The cups are then separated from one another by cutting and packaged for distribution.
For dispensing individual servings of cream in either liquid or powder form, or for butter or margarine, a very small volume cup is needed since the amount of product dispensed for an individual serving is small. Typically these small cups are designed to hold only about 1/2 ounce of material. Especially for cream, either in a liquid or in a dry form, it is important for the cup to have a proper "feel" since the consumer utilizes the cup directly as the dispensing utensil for adding the cream product to coffee or tea. For this purpose generally a cup having a rounded shaped has been found to be more consumer acceptable than other shapes.
A round shaped cup, however, is not an optimum design for utilization on a fill and seal cup packager. Further, a cup with a round lip is not an optimal design for material conservation since excess material must be trimmed (e.g. die cut) after filling and sealing to form the round lip of the cup. Trimming either must be done as a separate operation on a separate machine or if it is done directly on a cup packager, since trimming waste must be removed as a part of the cup packager working cycle, this requires a more complex cup packager.
To circumvent trimming, prior cream cups have been formed having a round bottom which tapers upwardly into a square shape. In order to strengthen the cup, these cups are then fluted with a plurality of vertical ridges which extend completely around the cup from the cup lip to the cup bottom and the bottom of the cups is circumferentially indented. The multiple vertically extending flutes and the indented bottom inherently increases the complexity of the cup forming die and the carrier plates of the cup packager. This has increased the expense of producing these prior cups and thus ultimately renders the product package therein less economical to the consumer.